ABSTRACT
In Book II, chapter IV of his The Science of Political Economy, Henry George (1898, p. 148) argued that the physiocrats were ‘the first developers in modern times of something like a true science of political economy’. George’s claim did not arise from a profound study of either the history of economic thought or of physiocratic writings. There is abundant evidence that his knowledge of the history of economics was rather slender, and on his own confession he had himself never read any of the works of Quesnay or his followers. For him, they were ‘fellow travellers’ and anticipators of his own ideas, and their importance arose from the fact that in the previous century they had arrived at proposals very similar to this own.
